Plug-ins (default set)

[paul90]

While we are adding the Markdown plug-in, #28, are there any of the older plug-ins that should be removed from the default install?

My initial though is that there are a few that rely on specific server attached hardware, twadio and txtzyme. And probably logwatch and parse as well.

Thoughts...

[WardCunningham]

Without looking, I would divide fedwiki's plugins into four categories:

• Core Plugins. These are those that without which wiki won't work. These are wired into wiki-client so that a simple server that couldn't support plugins could still work. Maybe image doesn't belong.
• Expected Plugins. These are major media types for which there might be ongoing improvement but rendering should be satisfactory anywhere. Html and Markdown, for example. Data and Method too, I hope. We write documentation in terms of these.
• Experimental Plugins. These explore some growth path for wiki that should not be forgotten even if they are not universally useful. Bytebeat, Rollup, Reduce, hopefully Txtzyme (with the Arduino version) There are some of these on the Factory menu now which we could do without.
• Other People's Work. These should (or already have) found another home. Twadio and Five Star are examples, though Five Star might deserve to move up. An experiment like Parse that was never completed belong here too.

We should be seeing more independently created plugins. I beefed up the mkplugin script to include setting up unit tests. That was half the work of writing Markdown. http://plugins.fed.wiki.org/make-plugin-script.html

We shouldn't be afraid of a proliferation of off-brand plugins. If you stumble across a page that doesn't render completely you can follow the journal to find a site with the plugins. From there you can read the About pages and they will direct you to the repository and community that supports it. To have it on your own site you add a line to package.json, npm install, and reboot.

Maybe we figure out how to do these last steps from within the application. Wordpress does, I am told. @nrn mentioned looking into this.

[WardCunningham]

p.s. @paul90, Thanks for updating all of that plugin documentation. I tried to review the changes methodically but may have failed to merge some. By the way, here are my scripts for downloading all the plugins and running searches against them. I should have used these instead of the web interface.

https://gist.github.com/WardCunningham/f096795d14c80ebf8e4c

[paul90]

As I have all the plugin repositories locally, a simple ls *plugin*/pages/* gives list all the plugin pages, which was used to create a page of links. Running up a server with an otherwise empty data directory makes it easy to pick out the pages that have been changed and move them back to the repositories.

The Pull Requests on the organization is the easiest way to see what it outstanding. Looks as if the activity, bars and twadio plugins, and the default pages in wiki-node-server were missed. Will merge them when I rebuild them all later, after breakfast.

[WardCunningham]

I have been working towards this reorganization as a goal with the working title Plugin Catalog. I would like to push this towards a conclusion, no matter how modest. I invite closing comments here.